SO THERE I was, a fish out of water at the Playboy building in Chicago,

editing a magazine called Oui that was, against all odds, phenomenally successful. I had a huge corner office with a view of Lake Michigan. I sat in it and played a wooden flute very badly, I wore loose white Indian shirts purchased in Berkeley. My beard and hair were both long; my friend of those years, Hendrik Hertzberg, described me as "alarming."

On some nights, after work, I would walk up to the Playboy Mansion for an editorial meeting with Hugh Hefner. He was a nocturnal creature, that Hefner. "Call me Hef," he said to me almost at once, so I did. Everyone did, although one woman I knew preferred to call him "Fner." He never actually read the stories in Oui -- or in Playboy either, for that matter -- but he did look at the photos very carefully.

I was often supposed to have an opinion about the photos. I didn't. Indeed, I was getting tired of them. I used to like pictures of naked women as much as the next young man -- I was 29 while this was going on, a callow youth or a boy wonder depending on who was talking -- but I was getting an attitude adjustment. Seen 3,000, seen 'em all.

These meetings would go until midnight, then Hef would go to join the bunnies in the swimming pool and I would stagger home to bed. The entire experience was otherworldly. My wife would sometimes still be up. She'd ask how it went.

"My cover model apparently has a muscle in her thigh."

"Is that bad?"

"Apparently." This is true, by the way -- a cover model was once rejected for having a visible muscle in her thigh.

SO I DID not like my own magazine very much, but I did enjoy putting it out.

It was wonderful to call up writers I admired and offer them real money for their stories. I asked Bud Trillin, who kept calling my publication "wee-wee magazine." He declined to participate, but lots of other people said yes.

Meantime, it was decided in the executive suite that I needed a handler of some sort, someone to act as a buffer between me and Hef. Some of my ideas -- like, "How about we run pictures of naked men this issue?" -- did not amuse the higher-ups.

My first handler was Arthur Kretchmer, the editor of Playboy. He did not want the job much, but he took it. He wasn't all that much older than I was, but understood how Playboy worked. He wanted to make me understand how Playboy worked. I was not a good student. I have authority issues.

He would yell at me. He was a large man with large hands, and when he unfolded himself from his chair and began to pace, I may very well have cowered.

He was (unlike many of the executives in the building) well-read and intellectually curious; he understood why I did not like my own very successful magazine. He may have had some ambivalences about his own very successful magazine, but he was far too canny to say anything.

HE ALSO THOUGHT I was naive, willfully so, and that I brought trouble on myself by being stubborn and self-righteous. He was absolutely right. I might have won more battles if I had listened to him, which meant that I could have stayed around longer. On the other hand, I really didn't want to become a Playboy lifer.

"Jon," he once said me, "you can't edit something you have contempt for."

When I quit my job a few months later, that was the phrase that ran through my head.

Arthur Kretchmer is retiring from Playboy sometime next year; a new editor has already been hired. I hope he finds whatever he's looking for, and has decades to enjoy it.